


Devil’s Bargain

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcoholic Dean Winchester, Angst, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Grieving, Guilty Dean Winchester, Hurt Castiel, Hurt/Comfort, I promise, Jack and Sam Save Cas, M/M, Multi, The Winchesters Looking After Their Angel, They Get Him Back, WinCasWin, and bring him home, snuggling and cuddling, temporary major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 01:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19802344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: There is a weapon that can kill Chuck, and Dean, Sam and Cas go after it.But the price is the sacrifice of something they love.The world is saved, but the cost to the Winchesters is beyond measure.





	Devil’s Bargain

**Author's Note:**

> Dear readers, this is probably going to be a painful story because they do lose Cas in it, but it is temporary, they get him back, so please be assured our boys will be together again by the end of the story.
> 
> That said, Cas does not fully recover from what happened, even with Jack’s help, but he is home and with his humans who will take very good care of him.
> 
> He is about to be the most snuggled and looked after angel in the history of angels.

Whoever was responsible for the special effects went all out, Dean had to give them that. He shivered as a wind that could cut glass ripped through the clearing, but did nothing to dispel the fog stirring eerily around the stone ramp, and the pillars and lintel that stood waiting at the top.

He glanced sideways at Cas, saw the angel’s lips moving as he quickly translated the slashes roughly carved into the stone.

“Well?”

Cas made an irritated gesture, _shut up_ , and Dean fought the urge to snap back at him. Sam must have sensed it; Dean felt his brother’s fingers tugging at his sleeve, an unspoken request for calm, and he jerked a nod at him.

He got it. Four words had utterly obliterated everything he had with Cas, maybe even everything _they_ had with Cas (and he was angrier at them both for that, that Sam should lose out because of it, but how else could that possibly go) and it felt like there was no power in the universe that could fix it.

He wanted to, he wanted to bad. But of all the things he’d done and said to Cas, that had to be up there. Top ranking in the Dean Winchester Hall Of Shame.

It wasn’t so long ago (it felt like yesterday, or an hour ago, it always felt like that even when he just had to turn around to see Cas was back) that he’d been watching Cas die, sitting vigil over his body, carefully wrapping him for the funeral pyre and then watching him burn.

And yet he’d said _that_.

He’d give anything to take it back, but it was said and done.

Like his relationship with Cas, and he knew, _knew_ , that when this was done…. Chuck was dealt with, Cas would go.

And they’d never see him again.

He jerked in surprise when Cas’s hand was on his shoulder, gently shaking him.

There was a look of concern on the angel’s face, and Dean waved him off.

“Sorry. You done?”

Cas nodded. “It says the weapon must be earned.”

Dean glared scathingly at the stone as if he could intimidate it by pure hostility alone.

It didn’t seem all that moved.

“That’s it? Dude, that thing’s got more markings that the damn Stargate and that’s all it’s got?”

Sam nudged him. “We think it might say more on the other side.”

But. He could hear it in their voices, and anyway….there was always a but….

“But?”

Sam looked back unhappily at the portal. “Once you go through, you’re committed. You can’t come back without the weapon, and you can’t get the weapon without earning it.”

“Great. Fucking great.”

He started towards the ramp, and Cas just as quickly caught him up.

“I should go,” he said.

Dean tugged his arm free of the angel’s grip. “Why? Because it’s your dad fucking things up?”

Cas got in front of him, and Dean knew better than to try and move him. “Because we don’t know what the conditions are on the other side; if the way to earn the weapon proves too long or too difficult, you and Sam could be trapped there without food or water.”

“And maybe it’ll take all of us to do it, ever thought of that? Or don’t you think you need the help of two humans? You like to try and do everything yourself, keep everything to yourself, right, Cas? You always know best.”

“No.” Sam got between them, pushed them apart. “This is not the place we’re having that conversation. We need our heads on straight, so either you knock this shit off, or we forget all about it.”

Dean didn’t miss how that was aimed at him, but he brushed it aside for now. They couldn’t forget all about it; the world was being torn apart around them, monsters like even they’d never seen attacking anything they could. Outbreaks of what the CDC thought were some kind of rabies, except it was the Croatoan virus (thankfully contained so far).

Chuck had given Pandora’s box a good shake, and tipped the entire churning mess over the whole damn planet.

They had to go through, because this was the only lore they’d found on a way to kill God without taking the universe out with him, and of course they had to find it in a old book that translated as “The Bible Of Lucifer”.

If that fuckwad had written it, Dean really didn’t want anybody but himself going through the doorway, but he doubted he’d be able to convince Sam and Cas to stay.

And every moment they delayed, they were getting closer to the tipping point.

He gave the two of them a ‘fine, but I’m _not_ happy about this’ glare and then stormed up the ramp.

Before he reached the doorway, he felt Sam grab his coat on one side, Cas the other, and that was how they went through.

++

Cas was right about the environment.

It was stone. All of it. Dark sky, bitingly cold, and stone.

Right up until the edge of what Sam looked over, and then waved Dean back.

“It’s a drop,” he said, and the look on Sam’s face told Dean it was way more than ten feet.

He turned around to where Cas was reading the enscriptions on the other side of the doorway. 

He looked around him, puzzled, and then started reading them again.

Dean snapped his fingers, impatiently, until Cas turned back to them both.

“The weapon is here,” he said. Dean did as the angel had, looked around, but all he saw was stone. Stone and sky.

“Where?”

Cas shook his head. “It will appear once it has been earned. By sacrifice.”

Dean felt like screaming. Just once could it not be like ‘that’ll be $200’ or ‘stand on your head for thirty seconds’ or ‘get kicked in the balls’.

“Great.”

Sam joined Cas, glancing carefully over the doorway. “Does it say what the sacrifice is?” He reached, consideringly for the black, shadowy mass that now filled between the pillars but Cas grabbed his hand and pulled it away.

“Sam,” he warned, and just like that a tiny maw with brutal teeth snapped out of the darkness where Sam’s hand had been, closed on nothing, and sullenly withdrew.

“No going back without the weapon, got it,” Sam said.

He let Cas lead him down away from the doorway, and Dean followed.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said, and Cas turned away from the shadowed passage to face him.

“Something we love,” he said. “That has to be sacrificed.”

++

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work it out from there.

This entire barren place held only three things (four, if you counted the hidden weapon) and each of those three things were _them_.

And that kind of narrowed down the list of things that they loved.

Dean got in front of Sam as his brother started for the cliff edge. “No. No fucking way. Anybody’s doing a swan dive here, it’s me.”

“Oh? Because you’re the big brother, right? We’ve been here before, Dean. So many fucking times. But this time I’m not going to let you do something stupid.”

“Right. You’re going to do it instead?”

“Dean. Sam!”

No. Cas wasn’t going to interfere this time. He’d caused this, because if he’d just opened his trap and told them about the snake, about Jack slip-sliding away from them, then there would still have been time to do something about it, before Mary died, before the three of them were now trapped here and his little brother was going to Cirque-Du-Soleil himself over a thousand foot drop.

“You can’t claim all the stupid in this family, Dean,” Sam said, and he grinned, and Dean fell for it, he did, because he didn’t see Sam’s fist come swinging at him.

It took him hard, crashing into his jaw with every inch of Sam’s weight behind it, and he went down, thumping hard onto the stone.

But he wasn’t out; as Sam tried to run past him, he stuck out his foot, tangled it in his brother’s legs and Sam face planted hard.

He rolled over, and shit, his nose was mashed, blood streaking the middle of his face, but that didn’t stop him kicking out hard enough at Dean to crack a rib.

So, no holding back then. Not when it meant Sam would walk away at the end of it.

He punched Sam hard in the balls, taking some of the fight out of him, and then rolled onto his brother’s back, got him in a choke hold and tugged tight.

Carefully, but hard, making sure he took Sam just to the edge, where he’d make sure Sam would stay down long enough that by the time he got up, it would be over.

Sam slapped at his arm, making the ‘tap out’ signal from their sparring sessions, but this wasn’t them practicising in the gym back at the bunker. 

He’d let go when Sam was under, and not before, and he doubled down when Sam’s other hand, inside of clawing back at Dean’s arms, or his face, starting reaching forward instead.

Dean followed his movements, wary in case Sam had seen a rock or something he could use to counter attack, but the only thing in reach was a sword, glinting crazily even when the only light around them seemed muted, cowed.

A sword that hadn’t been there before.

Dean let Sam go, sat back fast, let his brother roll over wheezing.

It took him a minute to be able to speak, and when it did, the word was pained in a way that had nothing to do with a broken nose, bruised balls and being choked out.

“Cas?”

Dean turned around, heart tearing in two, but there was no sign of the angel.

Not until he went to the edge of the cliff, anyway.

++

The sword worked.

The moment Dean drew it out of Chuck’s body, everything changed.

Not like Dean had feared, not like before, with the sun going out and the end of the world inevitably upon them.

It was like a reverse snap; the monsters unleashed by Chuck disappeared, but the people they’d killed all returned.

And so did Jack.

He seemed more surprised than anybody to be standing there, whole, empowered, and staring at them warily.

And then, of course, he asked for his dad.

For a moment, Dean was sure Jack was going to smite them both where they stood, but then he was gone, and there was nothing left to do then except go back to the bunker.

Which they did.

The weapon, Dean stored in the armory, locked away. They would never need it again, it having served its purpose, but the fucking cost had been so brutally high that….

They’d been unable to recover Cas’s body, and Dean felt like there should be something to show for what Cas sacrificed so neither of them would have to.

There was such a lot to pick apart, there. That Cas loved them both so much he threw himself over, no hesitation.

But it was one night, after Sam left to search for Jack (Dean didn’t blame him for going - everything fell apart even as the world pulled itself back together, but Sam could just have left and not used finding a dead kid as an excuse), when he was a third of the way through a bottle of whiskey, that he realised something else.

Despite what Dean said, despite how angry and bitter he was (and Sam, though he showed it less), Cas knew they loved him.

Else he would never have done it.

And that…. Dean didn’t know if that made it better, or worse.

++

It was nearly six months later that Dean heard a key in the lock of the bunker’s door.

He got up, unsteady, and reached for the gun taped underside the table.

Just in case.

But it was Sam. He came to the railing, and stared down at Dean, and …

He looked good; hair longer than before, fucksake, and with a full on facial growth like wherever he’d been hadn’t discovered the wonders of male grooming, but he looked _good_.

And...happy.

Dean found himself smiling at that, at having his little brother home.

And then he realised Jack was standing behind him, and he felt himself scowl.

He’d done nothing in six months to come to terms with anything, no point denying it. 

That had been his coping mechanism, and he’d been fine with it, but now it meant having Jack in front of him brought everything rushing back up and he wasn’t ready.

He started to turn away, but Sam called him back urgently.

“Dean, we need a little help.”

Of course. He turned around, squaring his shoulders, ready for the next onslaught, and looked back up, and….

Cas was standing between Sam and Jack, they were holding him up, and for that one moment, Dean was sure he was dreaming or fate was finally getting her revenge for all the shit he’d pulled.

And then Cas said his name, and Dean almost broke his neck running up the stairs.

++

First, Sam had to find Jack. He’d tried to talk to Dean about it, but Dean had spent a lot of those first few days drunk and even when he cut back a little, he was in no mood to listen and barely came out of his room.

But, after Jack’s death, Sam had started to dream about him.

Jack had things to tell him, about a deal Cas had made, to save Jack from The Empty.

Jack was there at that point, but so strong the the entity in residence couldn’t keep him asleep as it had tried to do with Cas.

And it was furious. It liked quiet. It liked peace. Jack ensured it got neither, mainly by repeatedly pointing out that since he was now trapped there, the entity had violated its agreement.

Whether by intent, or not, the accord had been broken, and Jack didn’t intend to shut up about it.

And so he’d managed to obtain a grudged, but powerful, offer of assistance, a new deal.

It would help them get Cas back, since his essence also remained where he’d died, in return for neither him, or Jack, ever coming near it again.

All Sam had to do was get back the sword.

++

Dean figured it showed just how drunk he was not to notice Sam sneaking that fucking sword out of the bunker, but it didn’t matter now.

Not with Cas lying between them, dressed in Sam’s tee shirt, and a pair of Dean’s own sleep pants, still recovering from what happened.

Jack had done his best, but the rest would take time, if it ever healed at all.

Cas was still an angel, but he was broken, physically, now, as well, and Dean knew they’d all have to make a lot of adjustments, but it didn’t matter.

They had him back, and Dean would do whatever it took to care for him.

“He’ll need crutches,” Sam murmured, stroking a finger over the rise of Cas’s hip where his pants had slid down to reveal a nasty, jagged scar cresting over an uneven swell of bone.

“I know a guy, he can help us fit a stairlift for getting to the door,” Dean said. He bent down to press a gentle kiss to Cas’s forehead, but the angel was completely out of it and didn’t even stir.

“And physio, but we can probably do most of that for him ourselves.”

Dean nodded. Whatever it took. He looked up at his brother, eyes nipping, saw Sam was no better, and reached up to cup Sam’s face.

“We got him back,” he whispered.

Sam nodded, and slid down to lie flat, and gently wrap his arms around the angel.

Dean turned out the lights, and then followed.

His family was home, and safe, and together, and this time…. This time, Dean was going to make sure they stayed that way.


End file.
